Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.

The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.

Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.

The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”

Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400

ChordGeometries, music in chord spaces

ChordGeometries 1.1 is a multiplatform application developed by Dmitri Tymoczko (a researched at Princeton University) for a research named “Generalized Chord Spaces”, conducted by Tymoczko himself together with CliftonCallender (Florida State University) and Ian Quinn (Yale University). The hypothesis they are trying to verify is the possibility to generalize some geometrical models describing connections between chords (voice-leading) so as to confer them a general validity. To this end, they’re analyzing some examples of voice-leading to prove that the spaces between a chord and the next one, which are a characteristic of these examples, belong to a wider family of geometrical spaces that share some essential qualities. Thus, if we represent these examples geometrically, we’ll see that a point in these spaces corresponds to a harmonic object (a chord), while a line connecting two points is the connection between them (voice-leading) and the length of this line is the “measure” of the voice-leading it represents. Therefore, the distance between two points is the measure of the minimum voice-leading between two harmonic objects and this implies that the graphs of each example can be treated the same way: they are all factors of the same kind of fundamental space, or spaces that are a result of putting those points in a wider space. To help us understand these complex concepts, the ChordGeometries 1.1 software visualizes chords and voice-leadings in a three-dimensional space. The chords may be inputed using a MIDI interface. For each of them, the application will create a representation where successive voice-leadings are visualized as continue paths in space. The importance of the research of these three American researchers can be understood within the frame of challenging the combinatorial paradigm that dominated the field of music theory in the last decades, and substitute it with a theory based on geometry and topology and – particularly – on the introduction of “space”.